Firefighters face a wildfire in Northern California. Image credit: mattspinner/Flickr Every summer, wildfires rage across the western and southern regions of the United States. These fires threaten homes, animals, and ecosystems, and they are also responsible for something else: carbon emissions. For decades, the primary strategies for dealing with these fires has been to prevent them at all costs then contain them when they erupt. New research, ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image credit: 10:10 Campaign/Michele Turton Paignton Zoo in the UK has already hit the headlines for exploring vertical farming to feed its animals. Now the zoo will be recycling the nutrients from that animal feed to power itself. That's right, Paignton zoo is seriously looking at getting into poop power. Elephant poop. And that's just one element of this innovative zoo's quest to slash its carbon emissions....Read the full story on TreeHugger

image: Carnegie Institution We've written about the phenomenon of outsourced carbon emissions a number of times, with the example of perhaps up to one third of China's emissions coming from manufacturing goods destined for consumption abroad being most prominent. Well, a new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution adds some more data to our our understanding of this issue:...Read the full story on TreeHugger

In Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, I have presented a plan to dramatically reduce carbon emissions by increasing energy efficiency and replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. In the push to reduce emissions, all eyes are on China, the world's most populous country and now also the world's top carbon emitter. Here are some highlights from the Plan B 4.0 datasets on China's energy economy:


...Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: Chor Ip via flickr. As any TreeHugger worth his or her epiphytes knows, preserving tropical rainforests is a major part of preventing the worst of climate change--deforestation itself causing nearly as many carbon emissions as the entire transportation sector. But over the past year...Read the full story on TreeHugger